Ferris Garage
Ferris Garage has two sites – one in Feock and one in Mitchell. The Mitchell site offers 24 hour breakdown and nationwide recovery, whereas the Feock site focuses on car sales, servicing, MOTs and repairs.
Director Tim Ferris says "Because we have two premises, I used to have to make a daily trip from one to the other to pick up their daily accounts on floppy disk. As this trip involved getting through the busy Truro city road network, this was time consuming as well as heavy in fuel use.
"However, since broadband, I can simply download the information every day – saving me the 26 mile round trip – which used to add up to over 7000 miles a year.
"Because of broadband I can also work on either computer server from one location and even see what is happening at Mitchell via CCTV. All the vehicles have satellite tracking and due to the speed of the connection, I can monitor their position in real time. This means I can effectively manage the two sites without having to travel."
Ferris Garage is also experiencing some savings in paper use.
Tim continues "We use email wherever possible now rather than send letters or faxes and, for example, we email invoices rather than send them by post. We also check accounts on the Internet rather then with printed versions. So our paper use is down – by around 10 % overall."
